Knife (9780698185623) Read Online Free PDF

reaction. He’d walk into his place after months of being gone and say,
Again? Goddamn,
all thick in his mountain-man accent. As if the concept of starvation and neglect shouldn’t apply to his animals. He told bar girls he was a hockey player and liked to give his cats milk—when they were alive—by shooting it from the gap of his missing tooth. One night he was attached to a four-man perimeter team stationed outside the objective while two teams cleared the inside of the home. The first team breached the doorway and cleared the first floor without finding anything more than a wife and her two young children asleep on the kitchen floor. When the second team hit the stairs leading up to the second level, the perimeter team saw someone open a window above them and drop a grenade, then tumble out the window after it. The explosion blew an arm off one of their guys, so Slausen slapped on a tourniquet, but not before Slausen leveled his weapon and put two in the head of the guy who had just come tumbling out the window. One of the wounded guys said Slausen hit the guy while he was in the air, and the other claimed it was after the landing. Either way, the window jumper had an eight in his forehead. Two holes with a shared middle. Slausen finished bandaging the wounded man, then flicked away an apple slice–sized piece of shrapnel smoldering in his calf. Squadron lore was that he was smiling and brushed it off like some crumbs he’d spilled on his pants. Smiling during the ordeal or not, Slausen was still missing half the calf of his right leg. It wasn’t hard to imagine him grinning without that front tooth while his flesh burned and blistered. He was an animal.
    â€œFor your zzzz’s, you goofy bastard,” Slausen said, tossing a bag of Ambien at Shaw’s chest. He winked. “Save me a seat by the shitter?” Shaw told him he would, and then Slausen gestured behind himself with his eyes wide. Shitter seats were prime spots. Foot traffic and fumes were better than navigating over sleeping team members sprawled out on the floor. Step on some groggy or drugged-out buddy’s balls, stomach, or head on the way to the john and the aggressor would have his own knocked around some.
    As Shaw made his way to the ramp a shorter man emerged from the dark behind Slausen, wearing the operators’ mission tops and bottoms—a mixed salad of earth-toned camouflage. He had a salt-and-pepper crew cut cropped to cliffs on his head and the skin of his face was taut to the bone, lined like dried-out riverbeds. He offered his hand to Shaw and mumbled, “Shoot straight.” It sounded like he was chewing on gravel.
    The man had four stars pinned to his top. His face, familiar from press conferences, took on a ghoulish pallor in the moonlight and the wrinkles cast deep shadows on his face. He looked like a corpse. Shaw realized that the man had just been appointed commander of Joint Operations and the new commander tried to strangle or otherwise break Shaw’s hand. Shaw returned the death grip and the four-star clapped him on the shoulder. Shaw walked past him, and a priest standing at his side threw the sign of the cross at Shaw as his boots slapped the ridged base of the ramp. He felt the cool metal ridges under the balls of his feet.
    A voice laughed out from behind him.
    â€œNo blessing, Father. I’m a Jew!”
    â€œThen you’re fucked!” someone answered from the dark.
    Shaw smiled and the cabin of the bird filled with laughter.
    The C-17 was a giant steel cross on wheels, more than half a football field in length, with a wingspan to match. Hundreds of men could cram into the empty cabin, but the squadron had two gun-mounted vehicles with .50-calibers on their roofs shackled down in the back of the bird and a few of the wooden pallets. The twenty men of Shaw’s squadron could split up and enjoy the ample space left on the two birds as they saw fit,